PENSACOLA, FLORIDA (REUTERS) - Hurricane Sally moved north-east Thursday (Sept 17), where it was expected to bring more than a foot of rain to some areas, one day after it flooded streets and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses on the US Gulf Coast.
Sally made landfall early Wednesday near Gulf Shores, Alabama, as a Category 2 storm
on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of intensity.
As of late Wednesday, it was moving north at 15kmh after being downgraded to a tropical depression, the US National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said, with maximum winds of 55kmh.
The storm is believed to have killed one person in Alabama.
"We had a body wash up, we believe it was hurricane related, but we have no definitive proof of that right now," said Trent Johnson, a police lieutenant in Orange Beach, Alabama. The person was local to the area, but has not yet been publicly identified, Johnson said.
Some parts of the Gulf Coast had been inundated with more than 60cm of rain as the slow-moving storm flooded communities.
The coastal community of Pensacola, Florida, suffered up to 1.5m of flooding, and travel was cut by damaged roads and bridges. More than 570,000 homes and businesses across the area were without power as the storm knocked over stately oak trees and tore power lines from poles.
Several residents along the Alabama and Florida coasts said damage caught them off guard. By late Wednesday, the floodwaters had started to recede.
"It was just constant rain and wind," said Preity Patel, 41, a resident of Pensacola for two years. "The water drained pretty quickly, thankfully. It's just cleanup now."
A section of the Pensacola Bay Bridge, known also as the Three Mile Bridge, is missing a "significant section", Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said at a press conference.
'HURRICANE AFTER HURRICANE'
On landfall at Gulf Shores, Sally's winds were clocked at 169kph. Along the coast, piers were ripped away by the storm surge and winds.
Electrical crews from other states arrived in Pensacola as utilities began restoring power to about 570,000 homes and businesses in Alabama and Florida, according to local utilities.
"This year we've just got hurricane after hurricane," said Matt Lane, 23, a member of a crew from New Hampshire Electric Coop, who arrived late Tuesday directly from Hurricane Laura recovery efforts in Texas.
Sally is the 18th named storm in the Atlantic this year and the eighth of tropical storm or hurricane strength to hit the United States. There are currently three other named storms in the Atlantic, highlighting one of the most active Atlantic hurricane seasons on record.
"We've only got one name left," said Jim Foerster, chief meteorologist at DTN, an energy, agriculture and weather data provider, referencing the procedure to name storms and the prospect of running out of letters. "That's going to happen here soon, Wilfred, and then we'll be into the Greek alphabet."
Hurricanes have increased in their intensity and destructiveness since the 1980s as the climate has warmed, according to researchers at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Climate change is also a factor in the increasing frequency of record-breaking wildfires plaguing the western United States, scientists say.
Damage from Sally is expected to reach US$2 billion to US$3 billion (S$2.72 billion to S$4.1 billion), said Chuck Watson of Enki Research, which tracks tropical storms and models the cost of their damage. That estimate could rise if the heaviest rainfall happens over land, Watson said.
As the storm moved east and inland, ports on the western Gulf Coast were reopened to travel and energy companies were beginning to return crews to offshore oil platforms.
Sally shut more than a quarter of US Gulf of Mexico offshore oil and gas production. Two coastal oil refiners halted or slowed operations, adding to existing outages from last month's Hurricane Laura and pandemic-related demand losses.
